Achieving long-term goals is of course a matter of building a long-term, far-mode aspiration out of near-mode, concrete building blocks. If this is connected to age, maybe it's important to have more collaborations between older and younger adults.
Conversation
I found that older people tend to be way more longtermist than young ones. It may sound trite, but people become rarely adults before they have children.
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Something like that, but subtly different, I think. People begin to *think beyond their lifetime* when they have children. I find myself thinking things like “ok, the rest of my life is for Simon now, and future other kids, not primarily for me.”
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“I may never get to see the Promised Land, but I can set my children up to get there” is parent thinking.
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This is “long term” in a sense, but in a different way than a teenager is long term. Teenagers have an *incredible* capacity to put themselves through acute risk and challenge, just out of ambition or kindness, with little guarantee of payoff. That gets harder with age.
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Teen!Sarah was way more anxious and depressed than I am now, and had abysmal social skills, but she also had way more physical and mental stamina, and more inclination to do hard things just “for the challenge” or “because someone asked for my help.”
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Teenagers *famously* are the very best at acts of reckless ambition or heroism. Think Joan of Arc, or Sophie Scholl. Or Juliet, for that matter. That’s the 13-year-old girl mindset: total dedication, heedless of risk to oneself. It’s a shame adults don’t appreciate it enough.
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(For me at that age it was running and math, neither of which I had natural talent for, but I made a heroic effort to git gud, and it worked.)
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Adults (it started maybe at age 27 for me?) somehow acquire expectations for greater comfort and/or try one hard thing too many where failure breaks their hearts, and so we become more cautious with our energy. Less likely to sign up for new long term projects of our own.
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(I used to be the kind of person who’d drop everything to help a friend. I burned out hard on that, failed to help some friends who needed me, and now I’m a lot more scared of signing up for new interpersonal responsibilities.)
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Teenagers are funded by their parents for years. It’s easier for them. At least middle class and up. I’m not particularly impressed by them. If adults were randomly handed 7-year support packages with no responsibilities besides learning and growing, they’d do similar things
And the median teenager does very little, free-riding those years pursuing low-effort fun, and scrambling later.
Of course the *people* in one life stage are no more or less impressive than the people in another life stage! This whole analysis is about the affordances people have and how that shapes behavior. Not everything has to be a diss. :p
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